Если история чему-нибудь учит, то ее урок таков: нет лучшего способа оправдать отношения, основанные на насилии, и придать им нравственный облик, чем выразить их языком долга, — прежде всего потому, ч...
It would appear to be a general truth that the more harm a category of powerful people do in the world, the more yes-men and propagandists will tend to accumulate around them, coming up with reasons w...
Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identifi...
When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word please, you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.
We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where this would not be true.
Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves...working forty or even fifty hours...
The problem is that for several hundred years now, it has simply been assumed that the guardian of that debt we owe for all of this, the legitimate representatives of that amorphous social totality th...
The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been descr...
So what are people actually referring to when they talk about deregulation? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like.
Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we’re wr...
Of the many wonderful tales Moor told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was Hans Röckle. It went on for months; it was a whole series of stories... Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffman-lik...
Markets aren’t real. They are mathematical models, created by imagining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge and is engaged in the same self-int...
Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world’s population into full-time indu...
Insofar as there is a politics, here, it seems a variation on a theme seen since the dawn of capitalism. Ultimately, it’s sociality itself that’s treated as abusive, criminal, demonic. To this, most o...
If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negat...
Finally, once we start thinking of communism as a principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership, it becomes clear that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some...
Almost all of those making the key decisions had attended college in the 1960s, when campuses were at the very epicenter of political ferment, and they felt strongly that such things must never happen...
All of this is a relatively recent innovation. The habit of always saying please and thank you first began to take hold during the commercial revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—amon...
After all, as we’re constantly reminded, the Internet has unleashed all sorts of creative vision and collaborative ingenuity. What it has really brought about is a kind of bizarre inversion of ends an...
It's no coincidence that the more jobs requiring college degrees become suffused in bullshit, the more pressure is put on college students to learn about the real world by dedicating less of their tim...